an epic struggle between life and technology

Tag Archives: Electronics

For our 1MZ swap into our lemons car we wanted to just use the Avalon dashboard since then no engine sensors will need to be swapped. The main issues with this are the fuel gauge sensor and the speedometer (since they are non Avalon parts). The fuel guage so far seems to “work” but we will see what the range is once we fill the tank. The speedo is a problem since the S54 transmission (from a Celica) uses a cable drive speedometer and the ’97 avalon uses an electronic speedo. With a little modification we found the avalon sender could be fit into the S54.

I have a 2008 Tomos Streetmate moped. Great for getting around town. Like many mopeds, the tail light (and brake light) run off the unregulated voltage coming out of the alternator. This allows the lights to run even when the bike is idling (~9V), but also means that on high speed downhills the light could be seeing up to 20V. Since automotive light bulbs are designed for ~14V, it means the tail light blows out all the time. This is bad since when you are riding it is impossible to know and not having a light will make it a lot easier to get hit at night. The LED will not only be much brighter but will come on faster (~100mS) which gives other drivers just a tad more time to react before rear ending me!

Hello I am Avi Moore writing about my mini submersible summer project. The submersible is an opensource project that was developed by two people that wanted to find some gold in a cave lake, they ended up not actually finding any gold but instead found themselves developing a new piece of technology. I got the idea to build the ROV because I read about the people that developed it in Make Magazine (http://www.makershed.com) and I was inspired to make the open ROV.